Tracing the Timeless Grammar of Indian Art

It all began with a lecture. In 2022, just before the launch of her book Colors of Devotion, author Anita Shah stood before a group of students at the Jawaharlal Nehru Architecture and Fine Arts University, invited to speak on Indian aesthetics. What she encountered there stayed with her long after the lecture ended. “They were fascinated, but they didn’t know about the aesthetic theory of India: the rasa theory, the compositional principles from our own shastras,” she said.

The realisation was jarring. Students well-versed in the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio had little exposure to India’s own aesthetic frameworks. “I felt very sad. All these ideas exist in our texts, yet they are not being taught,” she said. That moment became the genesis of her latest book, The Evolution of Indian Classical Art, a rigorous, six years’ engagement with India’s artistic and philosophical traditions.

Growing up with art

Shah’s relationship with art, began at home. “I have always lived in art,” she says. Today, many of the works reproduced in her book come from the couple’s own collection. Her questions, too, emerged from lived encounters. “I always wondered why Krishna’s form remained unchanged over centuries,” she says. “Or why Vishnu looks the same whether in the North or the South.” The answers, she discovered, lay not in stylistic conventions, but in something far deeper: vision, philosophy, and a shared grammar of form.

Mathura and the making of form

One of the most striking threads in her book is the centrality of Mathura as what she calls the ‘cradle of Indian art.’ It is here, she argues, that a pivotal transformation took place. “Before this, there was no form worship,” she explains. “People worshipped through yajna: through fire, through ritual.” Archaeological and literary evidence, including references in Ashtadhyayi by Panini, suggest that by the 2nd century BCE, the worship of Krishna and the Vrishni heroes had begun to demand form.

“When that need arose, the rishis meditated. In their visions, they saw the forms and from those visions came the kavya, and then the art,” she says.

This moment, she argues, marks not just a religious shift, but an aesthetic revolution. The visual language developed in Mathura: its proportions, iconography, and grammar, would radiate across the subcontinent. “Workshops in Mathura were supplying sculptures as far as Sanchi,” she notes.

The language of the sacred

The author who is one the Hyderabad’s foremost scholars in art makes a compelling argument that Indian art is not only decorative: it is philosophical, mathematical, and deeply experiential. Rooted in texts like the Natya Shastra, Vishnudharmottara Purana, and the Vastu Sutra Upanishad, the aesthetic framework she explores is rigorous.

“In Indian philosophy, the experience of rasa is paramount,” she says. “You first see the artwork: that is sakshatkar. But when you decode its meaning, its symbols, you experience it more deeply. That pause, that connection, that is rasa.”

The greatest victory of the book is that it is not a scholarly tome but something even young enthusiasts can enjoy, while the breath-taking pictures are a visual feast. Her takeaway is simple yet profound: that art becomes a pathway inward.